You are exactly right.
Way too nebulous a description. $100k per year is a shitload of money by any standards. That's a good salary for an experienced full-time software developer. The proposals should include clear specifications and timetables. The community deserves to know exactly what it will pay $100k for.
Also, it's a disingenious to say that witnesses get paid below minimum hourly wage. The block reward is 0.246 SP. Consensus witnesses get paid about three times that per minute (a backup witness takes every 21. turn) signing a block. The total block rewards per hour is 20x60x0.246 SP = 295 SP/h. A consensus witness gets 1/21 of that, which is 14 SP per hour. At 19 cents, that works out to $2.67 per hour or about $23,400 per year.
Sounds low, certainly below minimum wage? Obviously not because a witness server runs mostly by itself and normally does not require 40 hours of work per week to keep it running! It does cost a few hundred a month to run a witness server.
I think witnesses can be expected to some development as well. The middle class of Steem was mobilized to keep the chain independent. Our vote is collectively very important and we should keep the witnesses accountable. The same goes for the SPS. Results or out. The relatively large rewards are nobody's piggy bank.
Agreed.
Thanks for this info - I was curious how much witnesses made to generate blocks. I think that making that much for relatively low investment of time and energy is going to influence decisions. I like the platform and the decentralized element but I think that this wealth needs to be distributed more to regular users who want to create content!
Well, content rewards make up 65% of the pot. 10% go to witnesses, which is fine because their role is crucial and we don't want incompetent and easily bribed people occupying their position. 15% go to Hive Power holders. 10% goes to the Hive Proposal System.
Half of the content rewards are for content creators, which means that 47.5% of the rewards on this platform do not have to depend on the stake a user has at all. The roughly a half do only makes sense because you want to give HP holders a reason to keep their coins staked.
The EIP implemented last September struck a pretty good balance between stakeholders' and content creators' interests. There are many powerful curation projects and individual curators on the platform who are happy not to sell their votes and curate for free. The system really by and large works now.
10% of the entire reward pool going to 20 people is quite a lot, which means that the coveted spot of being a consensus witness must be earned. Thanks to Steemit, Inc wasting a lot of money in 2017 and 2018 in particular instead of accumulating a sizable war chest, STEEM was dumped hard in late 2018 and 2019, which resulted in a much more decentralized stake distribution than before. Thanks to it, the middle class has enough power to be able to heavily influence witness voting.
Most witnesses should be competent and productive developers particularly during crypto bull markets when the price of HIVE can go obscenely high. Paying someone $500,000 (when HIVE is $4) a year for running a couple of servers just won't do. It is not just Steemit, Inc that dumped a shitload of coins in 2018. Witnesses did it, too. At $500,000 a year, a Hive witness who develops a front end could pay a professional UX designer if that is not their own core competence, for example.